ShrinkWrapped

Dirty Little Secrets: Progressives and Race

In the 1960s the issue of "white flight" first came to the national attention.  Whites were leaving what were perceived as failing cities, like New York and Washington, DC and flocking to the suburbs.  Neighborhoods were found to "tip" when the number of black residents hit a certain percentage.  In a vicious cycle, the presence of a sizable minority of blacks caused home values to drop which accelerated white flight.  The causes of white flight were often oversimplified as white "racism" but this was always an inadequate and inaccurate explanation .  Whites left their neighborhoods because the schools were perceived (and in reality often were) in decline, crime increased, and the general quality of life decreased once the tipping point was approached. 

(We now know from recent sociological work that an additional important factor was the significant decrease in trust that occurs when a neighborhood's homogeneity decreases.  As well, people, not surprisingly, tend to want to live where other people who are like them live.)

The reasons for the decline of neighborhoods once they reached the tipping point are undoubtedly complex and I am not going to attempt an explication here.  The important point is that liberal whites as well as illiberal whites all took part in "white flight" in equal numbers and once neighborhoods approached the tipping point, their fate was sealed.  Such neighborhoods were on a pathway to decreased services, increased crime, falling property values, and failing schools. 

White flight has not been an issue for quite some time.  Our cities have made a come back as desirable places to live and the extreme segregation of neighborhoods is no longer a source of hand wringing buy the elites (who, of course, almost always live where the wealthy white people live.) 

Liberals, always quick to find racism in the utterances of conservatives, have done an interesting job of self selection in terms of their desired places to live.  Aaron M. Renn  has a thought provoking article available discussing "progressive" cities.  [HT: Steve Sailer]

The White City

Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group. 

His conclusions are interesting:

The relative lack of diversity in places like Portland raises some tough questions the perennially PC urban boosters might not want to answer. For example, how can a city define itself as diverse or progressive while lacking in African Americans, the traditional sine qua non of diversity, and often in immigrants as well?

Imagine a large corporation with a workforce whose African American percentage far lagged its industry peers, sans any apparent concern, and without a credible action plan to remediate it. Would such a corporation be viewed as a progressive firm and employer? The answer is obvious. Yet the same situation in major cities yields a different answer. Curious.

In fact, lack of ethnic diversity may have much to do with what allows these places to be “progressive”. It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics. Minneapolis-St. Paul, of course, is notable in its Scandinavian heritage; Seattle and Portland received much of their initial migrants from the northern tier of America, which has always been heavily Germanic and Scandinavian.

In comparison to the great cities of the Rust Belt, the Northeast, California and Texas, these cities have relatively homogenous populations. Lack of diversity in culture makes it far easier to implement “progressive” policies that cater to populations with similar values; much the same can be seen in such celebrated urban model cultures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Their relative wealth also leads to a natural adoption of the default strategy of the upscale suburb: the nicest stuff for the people with the most money. It is much more difficult when you have more racially and economically diverse populations with different needs, interests, and desires to reconcile.

In contrast, the starker part of racial history in America has been one of the defining elements of the history of the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and South. Slavery and Jim Crow led to the Great Migration to the industrial North, which broke the old ethnic machine urban consensus there. Civil rights struggles, fair housing, affirmative action, school integration and busing, riots, red lining, block busting, public housing, the emergence of black political leaders – especially mayors – prompted white flight and the associated disinvestment, leading to the decline of urban schools and neighborhoods.

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That's not to let these other cities off the hook. Most of them have let their urban cores decay. Almost without exception, they have done nothing to engage with their African American populations. If people really believe what they say about diversity being a source of strength, why not act like it? I believe that cities that start taking their African American and other minority communities seriously, seeing them as a pillar of civic growth, will reap big dividends and distinguish themselves in the marketplace.

This trail has been blazed not by the “progressive” paragons but by places like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Atlanta, long known as one of America's premier African American cities, has boomed to become the capital of the New South. It should come as no surprise that good for African Americans has meant good for whites too. Similarly, Houston took in tens of thousands of mostly poor and overwhelmingly African American refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Houston, a booming metro and emerging world city, rolled out the welcome mat for them – and for Latinos, Asians and other newcomers. They see these people as possessing talent worth having.

This history and resulting political dynamic could not be more different from what happened in Portland and its “progressive” brethren. These cities have never been black, and may never be predominately Latino. Perhaps they cannot be blamed for this but they certainly should not be self-congratulatory about it or feel superior about the urban policies a lack of diversity has enabled. 

It is telling that it is conservative Houston that has welcomed African Americans, Latinos, et al, rather than progressive Austin.

An important aspect of white flight is the deterioration of the educational system when a community "tips."  Although he does not directly comment on the effect of white flight on our schools, Tom Friedman notes that the deterioration of our public schools is leaving us with a large part of a generation unable to compete in the global marketplace:

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

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“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

Tom Friedman, as a liberal and progressive voice, does his part to ignore the elephant in the room.

Forty years of academic sociology and pedagogy have done little to explain why our children are failing.  Further, the fact that blacks and Hispanics fail in our schools to a disproportionate level, is a disagreeable fact that is almost always explained with an emphasis on the system rather than characteristics of the population who are failing.  As a result, our schools have been dumbed down so as to avoid harming the self esteem of children who will soon grow up to be adults who have no idea of how limited and ignorant they are.  Our public schools, for a host of reasons ranging from fears that there are too many sub-par teachers, to concerns of being called "racist" for failing minorities, prefer to minimize the demands 0n teachers and students.  Further, the inability to remove disruptive students without it becoming a federal case means that only one or two problem children can destroy the learning environment for everyone in the classroom. 

The progressive response has traditionally been to blame white racism for the failures of the educational system and for the resulting white flight.  It is not surprising but certainly telling that progressives practice white flight par excellence.  Perhaps the progressives could learn to handle their own racial attitudes better by studying how conservatives deal with racial issues, ie, by focusing on the individual rather than the identity group.

Speaking "Truth to Power"

The last time we had a President who was so insecure that  he had an enemy's list, the country suffered through a terrible trauma.  When the current administration singles out Rush Limbaugh and now Fox News for odium, it is alarming.  It highlights some aspects of the Obama administration that have been troubling for some time.  It suggests that Obama is extremely thin-skinned and hypersensitive to criticism.  These are characteristics that often bespeak a difficulty in learning from experience.  That is, if all criticism is a personal attack, the content of the criticism is discounted a priori, which means that no learning can actually take place.

When even those on the left are becoming alarmed, it can no longer be dismissed as a product of the "vast right wing conspiracy."  [HT: Glenn Reynolds]

Obama's dumb war with Fox News

There’s only one thing dumber than picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel -- picking a fight with people who don’t even have to buy ink. The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian -- Agnewesque? -- aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters.

There's more from Glenn Reynolds, worth noting, in response to Claudia Rosett:

ROSETT: First, they came for Fox News . . . . “This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets.” Some of ‘em have — but I think others are still angling for a government bailout . . . .

An Instapundit reader notes:

This kind of tactic can work, providing the established media plays along.

And Glenn responds:

They’ve been pretty supine so far. The question is whether Palmieri, in search of her “echo chamber,” will find it as easy to eunuchize the New York Times, the Washington Post, et al. as she did Matthew Yglesias. . . .

When the press no longer does their jobs it is a threat to our democracy.  The citizenry needs to be informed and the media once prided itself on "speaking truth to power."  Now, for most of the MSM, "speaking truth to power" has become an affectation, a pose they adopt to feel virtuous and brave while behaving in a craven manner.  Their shrinking business is richly deserved.

The Open MInd II: The Dangers of Obamacare

Ross Douthat in the Times this morning summarizes our healthcare problems succinctly:

The Catastrophic Option

Three major problems plague American health care. The cost of premiums is eating up an ever larger share of take-home pay. The cost of our public health care programs is eating up an ever larger share of the federal budget. And millions of people who need insurance are priced out of the market.

Now that Max Baucus’s version of health care legislation has been blessed, at least provisionally, by the hands of Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, it’s increasingly likely that Congress will pass reforms that address the third problem, while making the first two problems somewhat worse.

There is a more fundamental problem with our healthcare that will undermine all current attempts at reform.  John F. Opie looks at one small part of the debate:

What is Fundamentally Wrong With Health Care Plans...

There is one thing fundamentally wrong with the current House and Senate Health Care Reform plans.

Both ignore market realities.

By market realities I mean how and why the markets function: supply and demand.

Insurance sellers offer coverage for health-related expenditures in return for a cash flow from their customers. The size of this cash flow is dependent on two things, and two things only:

1) Risk
2) Coverage

Tamper with either of these, and you destroy the business model of insurers: if they cannot charge for increased risks, they will have to absorb those costs, which, given the fact that the insurance companies are businesses, means that they will increase base rates to cover those costs.

The same is true for increasing what is covered and who is covered. There are people out there whose lifestyles are so risky that no one wants to provide them with coverage, since there is little or no likelihood that extreme costs cannot be avoided; there are coverages out there as well that provide services that have virtually nothing to do with health-related issues, but rather are for comfort or for having fun. My insurance, for instance, doesn't cover going to the spa for relaxation; if it did, I'd be paying extremely high insurance rates that would, in sum, exceed what I would pay if I paid for the spa trips myself.

The crux of the problem is that Medical care costs more than people would like it to cost.  Our insurance system hides the true cost of insurance and has engendered the belief that medical care is, or should be, essentially free.  A variant is the shibboleth that "healthcare is a right not a privilege."

(A radio commercial that I recently heard features a little boy explaining why his mother should buy him a new video game because they have no co-pays or deductibles with their new insurance plan!)

Our current set-up hides costs, shifts expenses, and leaves everyone unsatisfied.  All the incentives are skewed away from efficiency.  Patients do not know the true cost of the services they are using.  Doctors usually do not know the true costs of the various treatments they offer.  Large insurers, especially government programs (Medicare and Medicaid) use their heft to pay below market fees for services which means that costs must be hidden and borne by private insurers and those who pay out of pocket or out of network. 

Government regulations add expenses that make medical insurance and care more expensive than it should be.  For example, the various mandates in all insurance programs means that we all must share the cost for expensive treatments that are used by a tiny minority (and are often elective) or are of uncertain efficacy. 

The current plans working their way through Congress all depend on the kinds of top down management that leads to shortages, rationing, decreased innovation, and a decline in care.

Only a Congress that fails basic math and economics would press ahead with plans promising to add millions to the insurance rolls while also insiting they will be saving money.  It is a farce and a travesty.  We are going to exchange a system that works for most people for a system that works less well, and increasingly so, for almost all, and as a bonus, the price tag will escalate out of sight.  As I have mentioned before, the worst impact will be on the pace of innovation, innovation which now assures that most of us who are relatively healthy in our 40s and 50s have a good chance to make it to our 90s and 100s in good health and with a good quality of life.

As noted in past posts on healthcare:

The effects on innovation:

Killing the Goose

Medicine is in the early stages of becoming an information science.  It is following the same arc as other information technologies, with extremely expensive innovations available for wealthy adopters (eg, laser eye surgery for $5000 per eye in 2000) and a rapidly declining price making it available to everyone else shortly thereafter. (Laser surgery is now available for ~$250 an eye in 2009.)  We are beginning to understand the fundamental defects in cancers, heart disease, even many brain illnesses, the entire gamut of biological errors that our flesh is heir to; to abort our progress now in the name of fairness would be unfair to all of us.  We would be destroying the goose that lays the golden egg of medical progress so that we could all equally share in the roast goose; perhaps delicious today but impoverishing us all down the road. 

The insidious notion of "best practices":

A Dangerous Health Care Misunderstanding

The point is that at any given moment, our knowledge of best treatments for any individual is limited and constantly evolving.  The "best practices" today may well be superseded or even contradicted by new "best practices" as our knowledge grows.

Further, Medicine is at a revolutionary moment:

 We are in the earliest stages of Individualized Medicine.  We can already identify specific tumor markers and genes that indicate specific treatments.  One day this will be true for every tumor; today it is true for a small fraction of cancers.  Before we arrive at a time where an individual's cancer treatment is inexpensive and routine, we must first pass through a time when an individual's cancer treatment is extraordinarily time intensive, expensive, and anything but routine.

Government run health care will destroy, or at best indefinitely delay, the advent of Individualized medicine.  If the guiding principle behind the cost savings of Government Health care is "to concentrate on the general level of care and not to squander a lot on long-odds cases" and "comparative effectiveness research"  we will be effectively enshrining the status quo as the gold standard of affordable medical care. How could we expect an insurance plan that has an overriding interest in minimizing costs to pay for a new treatment that is unproven and much more expensive than the current "best practice"?  Even if there are some patients who will benefit, it usually (as above) takes a long time, and millions of cases, before significant outcome improvements can be conclusively shown to exist.  This is a prescription for stagnation in Medicine.

Finally, a look at some of The Healthcare Debate Premises, including the idea that American healthcare does not provide good value for the expense and the zero-sum thinking of the Obamacare proponents:

First of all, the comment that "our care is also not necessarily world class overall either" is simply incorrect.  There are reasons people from around the world come to America for care that they cannot receive at home.  But leaving such notions aside, there is much to agree with in my friend's brief note.  It is a banal truth that "No system is perfect."  If that were the end of it, there would be nothing to discuss.  However, the idea that "Our system is discriminatory and not available to all" is worth parsing.

I do not know what my friend means by claiming our system is discriminatory.  If by discriminatory he means that not every person can have access to any Doctor, I suppose there is some obvious truth to that.  Otherwise I am at a loss.  No one can be turned away from an Emergency Room.  No one is denied Medical care because they lack the means to pay.  Certainly, if someone has enough money they can afford to go to the best institutions and the most renowned Doctors (who often do not accept most insurance.)  People routinely go "out of network" for care when they are dissatisfied with their treatments.  Because their insurance premiums have been held down by using only approved in-network Physicians who accept lower fees for the privilege, the patients are expected to pay a premium to go out of network.  This, however, is hardly discriminatory except in the most literal meaning of the word.  Again, I am at a loss to understand what is discriminatory about American Medicine.

It seems to me that the issues we should be addressing when examining our healthcare system are two fold. 

1)  How do we allocate scarce Medical resources?

2) How do we expand most rapidly the pool of scarce resources?

Those who propose wholesale reform of the healthcare financing system are making a systematic error.  Obamacare treats the healthcare pie as a zero sum system; they assume that the healthcare pie can only expand very slowly and that resources will remain limited forever.  For that reason none of the proposals in Congress address the supply side of medical care but only the demand side.  In fact, by attempting to expand the pool of patients for whom healthcare will be divorced from the actual cost of their care, the current plans will make the scarcity far worse, and permanent.

Were we to address Problem 2 and work on ways to increase the size of the pie, we could ultimately make healthcare more affordable and more available.

For example, there are a great many very bright young people who would at one time have been planning careers in the financial industry who are now faced with the necessity of changing career paths.  Many of them are quite talented in math and science (Physics PhDs have had an affinity for jobs as Wall Street "Quants") and could become Doctors, Nurses, and other healthcare professionals.  The problem for the brightest, best students, is that going to Medical School means facing up to a $200,000 debt as an entry fee to a field where the compensation is being pared away year by year.  Obamacare will make this worse; fees to Doctors will have to either continue to decrease of fail to keep pace with expenses all the while the Doctors are expected to see more and more patients.  This is a formula for less Doctors, not more.   

Beyond the supply of Doctors, there is the fact that healthcare is becoming an Information Science with all the implications that that has for the price curve.

The summary statement remains.

Healthcare:

1) Affordable

2) High Quality

3) Universal

Pick two of the three...

The Vicissitudes of Rage

Primitive anger is often experienced as rage.  The desire to not just remove, but destroy, mutilate, and eviscerate one's enemy is an expression of the primitive rage that lives within each of us.  As we become more civilized, ie mature, our rage is ameliorated by offsetting tender feelings and empathy.  By the time we are adults, we have managed to minimize those occasions when our rage finds its way into open expression.  Healthy adults rarely experience true rage unless under extreme duress.  Adults who are unaware of their own capacity for rage tend to deny, suppress, and in other ways disavow their own rage, but like all conflicted thoughts and feelings, it constantly seeks avenues for expression.

In Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a caretaker, generally the mother, expresses her need for attention and (fantasied) love though her child:

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP), a type of factitious disorder, is a mental illness in which a person acts as if an individual he or she is caring for has a physical or mental illness when the person is not really sick. People with MSP assume the role of a sick person indirectly by producing or lying about illness in another person under their care, usually a child under 6 years of age. However, cases have been reported of adult victims of MSP. (The term "by proxy" means "through a substitute.")

MSP most often occurs with mothers—although it can occur with fathers—who intentionally harm or describe non-existent symptoms in their children to get the attention given to the family of someone who is sick. A person with MSP uses the many hospitalizations as a way to earn praise from others for her devotion to the child’s care, often using the sick child as a means for developing a relationship with the doctor or other health care provider.

People with MSP might create or exaggerate the child’s symptoms in several ways. They might simply lie about symptoms, alter diagnostic tests (such as contaminating a urine sample), falsify medical records, or induce symptoms through various means, such as poisoning, suffocating, starving, and causing infection.

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This disorder can lead to serious short- and long-term complications, including continued abuse, multiple hospitalizations, and the death of the victim. (Research suggests that the death rate for victims of MSP is about 10 percent.) In some cases, a child victim of MSP learns to associate getting attention to being sick and develops Munchausen syndrome him or herself. MSP is considered a form of child abuse, which is a criminal offense.

The caretaker convinces herself that the child is "really" ill and will often cause harm to the child in order to fulfill her conscious need for care and, more importantly, the unconscious rage at the child whose overwhelming real primitive demands on the mother force her to hide her own (unconscious) primitive needs.

In this way the mother behaves as if she is a loving, caring person (and convinces herself of the same) all the while channeling her unconscious rage toward her child.  The Doctors who take part in the fantasy enactment, often by doing invasive and dangerous procedures, are unwittingly pulled into the drama and become the agent by whom some of the rage is expressed.  Again, the Doctors typically imagine they are doing their jobs of helping the unfortunate child, all the while exacting terrible damages upon the innocent victim.

We would all recognize that anyone who encouraged the mother to continue obtaining medical consultations in the face of negative findings, who encouraged such a mother to insist upon invasive testing, especially once faced with evidence of the mother's contribution to the child's disorder, would be nearly as culpable as the mother in the abuse of the child.  We would imagine that the abettor would likely be channeling his or her own unconscious rage through the mother and child dyad for enactment by the Doctors.

What happens when such expressions of "unconscious rage by proxy" occur in the international arena?  This is courtesy of Dan Schueftan in YNET:

The Palestinians did it again

Palestinian society remains politically immature, addicted to excuses

Part 1 of analysis

The recent Temple Mount riots and Mahmoud Abbas’ renewed request for a UN discussion of the Goldstone Report again point to the deep structural failure inherent in the Palestinian political culture.

The Palestinians are proving yet again that even the responsible elements among them cannot act in a constructive manner in order to build society and promote stability, welfare, and an agreement with Israel. They cannot do it because, as it turned out again, at the moment of truth we see the irresponsible, violent, and demagogical radicals who incite and fan the flames gain the upper hand.

The radicals win because the Palestinian public is unwilling to back an ongoing and responsible effort that would ensure a better future for its sons, while the radicals present a vision of violence and self-righteousness that offers fleeting achievements and twisted satisfaction in the immediate and short term.

Nidra Poller has an excellent summary of the events that led to Dan Schueftan's article, well worth reading to appreciate how the international press promulgates stories that are so distorted as to constitute modern blood libels:

Palestinian Muslims Pelt French Tourists and Blame it on the Jews

As the story goes, Palestinians attacked a group of French tourists who were visiting the “esplanade des mosquées” (French for Temple Mount). Israeli police intervened. Calls for help broadcast from the minarets drew Palestinian youths who scuffled with the police here and there in the Old City. It took several hours for calm to be restored. A dozen Palestinians and 17 policemen were injured.

Reports then make a quantum leap to flaming declarations from Palestinian officials. Saeb Erekat accuses Israel of “deliberately escalating tensions in Jerusalem” by sending police to the mosque compound just when President Obama is striving to bring peace to the region. The Palestinian Authority Information Ministry accuses “Israeli occupation police and extremist settlers of breaking into the courtyard of the mosque, firing tear gas bombs and live bullets” against Palestinian worshipers. The PA demands an emergency meeting of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Gaza government spokesman Tahar an Nazou calls the Islamic nation to defend the al Aqsa mosque against aggression. Hamas authorities order the PA and Fatah to break off “useless” talks with the “occupation,” and advise Arab governments to speak out forcefully against Israeli crimes against al Aqsa Mosque and the Palestinian people, and stop hoping for an American solution. Islamic Jihad leader Abdallah Chami calls the Palestinian people to unite against Israeli plans to undermine the al Aqsa mosque and “Judaize” al-Quds (= Jerusalem). The residents of al-Quds, he adds, will firmly resist Zionist attempts to attack the mosque. PA President Mahmoud Abbas accuses Israeli authorities of “a crime that calls for an immediate intervention of the international community” and warns that these actions “destroy all efforts to bring peace and establish an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Granted, these extravagant declarations are the stock in trade of Palestinian leaders and their international fan clubs. But what exactly is the war crime that was committed on the Temple Mount / Mosque Compound on the 27^th of September? Countless newspapers big and small picked up and retailed the story in French or English without giving it a second thought. If Israeli soldiers harvest the organs of their Palestinian victims and committed a variety of war crimes in the 2008 Cast Lead operation in Gaza, why question their guilt in this admittedly minor incident?

Did any news editor actually read the accounts before publishing them? How would a journalist pitch the story? Palestinians throw stones at French tourists visiting the mosque compound. Jerusalem police forces intervene. Skirmishes in the Old City pit police against Palestinian youths. X injured, x arrested. Saeb Erekat calls for an emergency session of the Arab League. Mahmoud Abbas declares that all hopes of peace are dashed. Hamas calls the faithful to defend al Aqsa mosque against assault by the occupation forces. Ban Ki Moon… International Court… Amnesty & the gang… everyone is up in arms.

Yesterday Richard Landes wondered how supposedly ethical and humane people could encourage the worst in the Palestinians:

Of course it doesn’t help that intellectuals in the West encourage the worst of their tendencies. Like Saïd’s appalling rant at the end of his life, they’re the most ardent defenders of Arab honor, even if they do present themselves as militating for Palestinian “human rights.” What hatred must move people to encourage these deeply destructive, dysfunctional phenomena?

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is obviously not an exact analogue of the kind of rage by proxy expressed by leading intellectuals in the West, yet the dynamics (not confined to Munchausen by proxy but evident in many circumstances) show some similarities.  The leading intellectuals fancy themselves concerned, caring people wishing only for the best for the poor, downtrodden Palestinians, "children" dependent on the goodness of the international community.  At the same time their "care" ends up facilitating murderous rage by the Palestinains and provoking defensive attacks from Israel that, even in the best case scenarios, still harms the innocent.  

[I will not here discuss the concept of projective identification, a difficult topic which is impossible to disentangle from the Gordian knot of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.  It surely deserves its own post one of these days.]

They further make their rage evident, under the rubric of justice and peace, by attempting to prevent the Israelis (indeed, any democracy) from defending themselves from the predations of the worst, most hateful among us. 

[For a counter to the Goldstone Report, consider the letter from Col. Richard Kemp, noted by Elder.]

Primitive rage is an unacceptable, intolerable affective state for civilized human beings to experience.  Thus, we see it most often expressed under great duress or in circumstances where the person can escape the shame of surrendering to it (road rage, for example.)  By finding others who are ready, willing, and able to channel the rage, the sophisticated intellectual can imagine himself to be a creature of refined sensibilities, removed from such distasteful expressions of rage, caring for the downtrodden and oppressed (as long as they don't move in next door) and committed to justice.  In their virtue they cause mass suffering while celebrating the release of their disowned rage. 

Whats the Matter With Kansas?

I do not have much time for blogging today so I offer a conundrum instead.  The thesis of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America is that most Red State Americans do not understand that their economic interests are best served by the Democrats and have been fooled into voting for Republicans based on "values."  The clear implication is that most Red Staters are not nearly as sophisticated in their political and economic understanding as the Bi-coastal liberal.  The lowest common denominator view among those on the left is that Red State Americans are simply dumber than liberals.  (The common perspective is that Conservatives are either dumb or, if they are too overtly smart, evil or venal.)

Consider these two items from Ed Morrissey this morning concerning the Democrat's "bipartisan" bill reforming healhcare that just came out of the Baucus committee:

Shell games in the Senate for ObamaCare

Recall how Democrats hailed the Baucus plan in the Senate Finance Committee for not increasing the deficit?  It accomplished that by keeping scheduled cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates to providers, which will drive many of them out of the Medicare business — and Democrats know it.  To correct this, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) introduced a separate bill to increase those payments, which will cost more than $240 billion over the next ten years and substantially increase the deficit:

So, the Baucus bill saves money by cutting reimbursement to Doctors that is then restored in another bill!  You really have to read Ed's entire post to appreciative the cynicism and dishonesty at work here.  And then there is this:

Video: Reid dismisses $54 billion in tort-reform savings

Harry Reid struggles with math as well as with common sense in this clip from yesterday, which highlights Reid’s argument against considering tort reform as part of the overhaul of the American health-care system. Reid gets his numbers wrong, gets his scale wrong, and in the process admits that the actual cost of the Baucus plan is not $829 billion but $2 trillion:

A healthcare reform bill that does not include tort reform is a non-serious bill.  Estimates are that up to 20% of Medical tests are ordered by Doctors not because we expect them to be informative but because we need to protect ourselves against potential liability suits.  Again, read all of Ed's post and take note that Harry Reid inadvertently lets slip that the CBO numbers being used to tout the savings in the Baucus bill are based on smoke and mirrors disguising massive new expenses.

All in all, it leads me to wonder if the answer to Thomas Franks is another question:  How stupid do they think we are?

Better Living Through Chemistry? Part IV

In Better Living Through Chemistry? Part I, I described the history of Psychiatric diagnostic approaches and the problems arising from a dependence on a symptom based diagnostic system versus a system based on an etiological understanding of dysfunction and disease. 

In Better Living Through Chemistry: Part II, I described, using patient examples, how the availability of less toxic medications along with the use of subjective symptoms for diagnosis, led to a reconceptualization of unhappiness as a treatable condition, "Depression."  In my examples I tired to offer some admittedly superficial guidelines for differentiating unhappiness from the life altering dysfunctional state known as Depression.

In Better Living Through Chemistry: Part III, I discussed the tendency for Psychiatric diagnoses to metastasize such as to increase the fluidity and diminish the boundaries of Psychiatric diagnosis.  As more and more conditions become subsumed under the rubric of an "illness" personal responsibility and agency are diminished.

The psychiatric contribution to the diminution of responsibility and agency is receiving powerful support from legal efforts to use novel theories of the mind superficially based on Neuroscience that aim to diminish legal responsibility and agency.  [HT: Dr. Helen]

Blaming the Brain

Steven K. Erickson
University of Missouri School of Law

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, Vol. 11, 2010

Abstract: Criminal law scholarship has recently become absorbed with the ideas of neuroscience in the emerging field of neurolaw. This mixture of cognitive neuroscience and law suggests that long established conceptions of human agency and responsibility are fundamentally at odds with the findings of science. Using sophisticated technology, cognitive neuroscience claims to be upon the threshold of unraveling the mysteries of the mind by elucidating the mechanical nature of the brain. Despite the limitations of that technology, neurolaw supporters eagerly suggest that those revelations entail that an inevitable and radical overhaul of our criminal justice system is soon at hand. What that enthusiasm hides, however, is a deeper ambition among those who desire an end to distributive punishment based on desert in favor of a prediction model heavily influenced by the behavioral sciences. That model rests squarely on the presumption that science should craft crime policy at the expense of the authority of common intuitions of justice. But that exchange has profound implications for how the law views criminal conduct and responsibility - and how it should be sanctioned under the law. Neurolaw promises a more humane and just criminal justice system, yet there is ample reason to believe otherwise.

The current state of Neuroscience is now being misunderstood and misapplied on regular basis.  Though I generally enjoy his writing, David Brooks exhibits the common tendency to overvalue the data now accruing to the very immature science of the mind known as Neuroscience:

The Young and the Neuro

In 2001, an Internet search of the phrase “social cognitive neuroscience” yielded 53 hits. Now you get more than a million on Google. Young scholars have been drawn to this field from psychology, economics, political science and beyond in the hopes that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.

These people study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology. Matthew Lieberman of U.C.L.A. is doing research into what happens in the brain when people are persuaded by an argument.

...

... consciousness is too slow to see what happens inside, but it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.

Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

My back of the envelop computations suggest that current Neuroscience technology needs to improve by at least 6 orders of magnitude before we can begin to reliably describe behavior at the level of the neuron; even then, there is no certainty that we will have fine enough resolution to tease out the contribution of individual neurons or neural networks to any specific behavior(s).  To paraphrase Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind, "the mind is not computable."   (Many others disagree, of course, but certainly, for now, the statement is accurate.)  We may some day be able to simulate a human mind, perhaps we will one day be able to upload minds into hardware, but we are a long way from that day, our first steps remain quite rudimentary, and extrapolating from the present is almost certainly a category error; ie, its not even wrong.

However, the Neuroscience fallacy, that human behavior will one day (soon) be understood in terms of its underlying neurological components, is doing more than fueling a left wing dream of a "radical overhaul of our criminal justice system."  It is also being used as evidence for the Nurture hypothesis, ie that genetics is relatively insignificant and that Culture (Nurture) is primary. 

The two opposing views of Neuroscience are already being politicized and resolved selectively.  Genetic determinism (Nature) is in conflict with cultural determinism (Nurture) and Neuroscience is being used selectively to support both sides of the debate when it is politically expedient.  Both arguments, of course, oversimplify an exceptionally complex topic, but such oversimplification serves the purposes of those who muster the arguments to support their politics. 

David Shenk, at the Atlantic, is a strong proponent of the Nurture argument.  Note his explanation for his interview request of Keith Jarret:

Keith Jarrett, Part II: The Q&A

DS: Thanks so much for taking the time. My idea for these interviews is to talk to extraordinary achievers about the roots of talent and the process of achievement. In the book, I try to defuse longstanding myths of "giftedness" and innate talent. I start with genetics. It turns out that genes, as you may know, interact with everything around them. They're not blueprints with established plans, but more like switches that get turned on and off all the time. So we need to get past the whole idea of nature versus nurture and instead understand nature as constantly intertwined--

KJ: In other words, those people that think I'm a freak of nature and therefore there's no point to trying are wrong, like I've always said. If they're not going to try to do it, they will never find out if it's possible.

DS: Exactly. We can't know our true potential until we put in an extraordinary amount of effort and time. And a lot of other things have to come together. One has to have the right resources, right motivations, and so on.

This is nonsense; again, it is not even wrong.  No amount of practice and dedication would have made me the equal of Derek Jeter on the baseball diamond, and no amount of study and schooling would make someone with an IQ of 85 an adequate Medical Doctor.  Shenk never recognizes that immediately after posing that the whole idea of nature versus nurture is passee, he dismisses the "nature" part of the argument, as if the "right resources (and) right motivations" do not themselves result from a complex admixture of both innate and acquired properties.

To understand how this is being misused politically, simply compare this with the evolution in our understanding of homosexuality, and especially the politically inspired determination that it is an inherent, genetic predilection rather than a choice.  (For purposes of clarity, those are the two poles of the debate; in reality, object choice, in Psychoanalytic terms, is an extremely complex outcome of constitutional and environmental factors.  For rare individuals homosexuality may be a choice but for the vast majority, it is just part of who they are.)  Consider OneSTDV's explanation of the current status of homosexuality and the question he raises:

Moral Perspectives: Homosexuality vs. Pedophilia

Since the 1960's, homosexuality has become a somewhat mainstream sexual preference. While it still has some social stigma, it's generally accepted as a common aspect of biology and not that of mental illness or social deviancy. Given the ubiquity of homosexuality and several theories regarding the "gay gene", "gay germ", or even the "ghost twin syndrome", there's a reasonable argument that truly homosexual individuals, like RuPaul and Rosie O'Donnell, didn't choose to be that way. As a result, polite society has embraced homosexuality as different from the normal, but still "normal". [This is an important point of the argument, so if it's not clear, please say so in the comments.]

Yet, if such acceptance is afforded to homosexuality, how can the modern view of pedophilia be justified? Maybe this is a contentious idea, but in my opinion, pedophilia is a biologically based abnormality affecting a surprisingly large number of people (who else watched those Dateline marathons?). The non-violent, non-intrusive pedophile has an inherent desire for underage children. Just like homosexuality, this deviates from the normal sexual preference.

If one considers homosexuality, due to its biological basis, acceptable even though it differs from the norm, then why is attraction to (not assault of) underage children considered so morally abhorrent? The two situations are almost identical scenarios, yet the social framing of them differ widely. Either one must accept both as immoral or accept both as biologically based abnormalities with no moral connotation.

Where I disagree with OneSTDV is the notion that homosexuality must be considered in parallel with pedophilia.  Homosexual behavior between consenting adults is, to my mind, none of my business even were I to consider it morally wrong, whereas pedophilia, even when committed by a great "artiste", is a morally reprehensible behavior deserving of the gravest punishment.  Yet the underlying argument, that homosexuality, pedophilia, in fact, any aspect of character and behavior is biologically determined, is being used legally to diminish personal responsibility. 

The Psychiatric profession had given its imprimatur to the biological determinists in its eagerness to expand the boundaries of Psychiatric diagnosis (requiring Psychiatric treatment and medications.)  The problem legally and Psychiatrically is that they are trying to address a question better suited to Philosophy than Science, ie the question of free will.  What is missing in all the discussions is the quaint, old fashioned notion of "free will" merely dressed up in modern language and disguised by modern technology.  Neuroscience cannot determine whether or not human beings have "free will."  Neuroscience does offer support for the notion that we often do not know why we do what we do (ie, much of our own mind remains unconscious) but even if the Pedophile has no control over his desires, he still must be held absolutely accountable for his behavior. 

For over a hundred years Psychiatry has been involved in a discussion of the limits of legal responsibility.  The McNaughton rule (1843) held that

the jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Since the McNaughton rule was promulgated, there has been a steady expansion of the concept of legal insanity, such that conditions as varied as PMS and Hyperglycemia (the "twinkie defense") have been used by clever Defense Attorneys to gain a determination of innocence for their clients.  The shallow understanding of Neuroscience, with a commensurate distortion of its explanatory power, offers nearly unlimited opportunities for diminishing responsibility, not only in the legal realm but in the public square as well.

The ever expanding realm of Psychiatric illness is working in concert with powerful pharmaceutical, legal, and political interests to diminish the unique personal agency and responsibility of each individual member of our society. 

We may yet find ourselves mirroring the old unlamented Soviet diagnostic system, where all unpopular behavior was pathologized; in our case it will be form a desire to "make people better" but the results will be the same.

Once we have controlled speech with our "hate crimes" law, we can begin (continue) to pathologize those who insist on voicing "illegal" speech.  Impossible?  Ask Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.

Paradigm Shifts

It is possible that the recession has already ended.  Unfortunately, even if the official numbers show that the recession is over, we still remain mired in an economy that cannot generate new jobs fast enough to reduce unemployment.  The Democrats seem stuck in an unworkable dynamic; the stimulus has not stimulated and with talk of a second stimulus growing, a repeat performance is likely.  The Keynesian paradigm does not seem to be working.  The Republicans may have some better ideas, but probably not for the reasons they imagine.  In any event, their ability to influence policy in the next couple of years is quite limited.  Whenever a paradigm fails, and this recession is nothing so much as the result of a failed paradigm (though there is a great deal of disagreement on exactly the components that actually make up that failed paradigm) the greatest fear is that what comes to replace the failed model will be less robust and less effective than what has failed.  A new economic model evolving from the ashes of the current structure that is less effective would be a long term disaster as millions, perhaps billions, of people find their standard of living decreasing and further billions in the lowest rungs consigned to permanent subsistence.  It often seems as if the salons in Washington, Beijing, London, etc, are doing their best to minimize the chances of a more efficient economy coming into existence.  Just at home, passing Cap and Trade, the Healthcare bill, and a new stimulus will all increase our debt making higher interest rates inevitable while diminishing the ability of entrepreneurs to create new businesses and new jobs.  Eventually, entrepreneurial enterprise should win out but it could take a very long time.

There are a number of data points which suggest that we are experiencing a genuine paradigm shift that has not yet been well understood or well characterized.  Simon at Classical Values offers some pessimism:

Something Is Missing

In Secular Decline I discussed how we can get out of our current financial troubles. I talked about Kondratieff Waves and what drives economic cycles. Innovation.

...

What we have been doing is eating our seed corn. New ideas have a profitable lifetime. And with information diffusion as fast as it is these days the lifetime is short. Which means we need more discoveries per year just to stay in one place.

...since the 1990s, labs dedicated to pure research--to the pursuit of scientific discovery--have seen funding slowly decline and their mission shift from open-ended problem solving to short-term commercial targets, from pure discovery to applied research. Bell Labs had 30,000 employees as recently as 2001; today (owned by Alcatel-Lucent ALU) it has 1,000. That's symbolic and symptomatic of the broken link in the U.S. business model. With upstream invention and discovery drying up, downstream, industry-creating innovation is being reduced to a trickle.

It's easy to ascribe current job losses in the U.S. to the deep recession or outsourcing. Both are to blame, but neither is at the root of the larger problem, which is lack of new, high-quality job creation. We are in the throes of the fourth recession since 1981. We have been outsourcing jobs for decades, but we have always bounced back with a new industry--a blockbuster industry. Discovery drives innovation, innovation drives productivity, productivity drives economic growth. But this time it's different, and whenever the current recession mercifully ends, the U.S. economy will not respond with the same job-creating vigor we have come to expect.

So what is our esteemed President doing to counter this difficulty? Is he spending the majority of stimulus money on stimulating research. Of course not. It is going into stimulating his cronies. It is the kind of thinking you get when you have lawyers running the government. Zero sum thinking. I win you lose. And of course we got that in spades from our President with the "We won" statement.

Maybe Mr. Obama needs to read The Myths of Innovation. He might learn that innovation is a matter of putting a lot of pieces together and that the more pieces you have to work with the greater are the options for profit. Take one idea from biotechnology, two from computer science and mathematics, and three from management theory and you get a profitable business. Which says that research on a narrow front is not going to do it.

I do not know if our basic research is starving for funds and ideas.  In many areas of science and technology, we have so much new data that the only way to begin the process of discovering new relationships is through data mining, a field that is still young in its applications to such diverse fields as biology and materials science. 

Tom Barnett focuses on the way in which our tax structure inhibits innovation:

Manufacturing in America: the solutions are primarily political

IN DEPTH: "Can the Future Be Built in America?" by Pete Engardio, BusinessWeek, 21 September 2009.

Key quote from a former CEO: "Other countries actually pay you to create jobs. The rest of the world is chewing us up alive."

The good news? "The U.S. is at or near the cutting edge in most of the emerging product areas."

The problem is not cheap Asian labor, rather it's that "the U.S. is losing its lead in large-scale high-tech manufacturing."

The diagnosis:

Much of the blame lies with U.S. government policy. Nations in Asia and Europe aggressively court strategic high-tech industries with generous tax breaks, cash grants, cheap credit, low-cost utilities, and speedy regulatory approval.

Even when our tax breaks are factored in, the U.S. corporate taxes are among the highest in the world. Michael Moore may see this as good (taxing those inherently evil corporations), but it's cutting off our nose to spite our face.

The Wall Street Journal has an article which purports to diagnose the problem as resulting from a surfeit of labor as Chinese and Indians move into the productive middle class. 

Global Worker Surge Was Behind Recession

Some say the worst recession since the Great Depression was caused by an implosion of standards on Wall Street. Others blame bad government policy that set the stage for all the pain.

What if that’s wrong, and if instead, all the troubles were linked to a surge in the global work force in the wake of globalization?

I linked to the WSJ article not because it is persuasive but because it suggests that the "experts" remain at a loss to understand how we came to this point.  Before you read the article you would be well served to spend some time savoring John Opie's deconstruction of its premises:

Oh, the Humanity...

Now, those workers apparently, nasty little capitalists like they are, saved portions of their income instead of consuming it all (after all, when they poor it was much better: they consumed everything they produced and hence were unable to shock the industrialized countries), and because there was no where for this money to go, it went overseas. Exchange rates didn't adjust to stop this, and all that money made the US go weak at the knees and forget about everything.

So, if the US economy had found better ways of spending all that money, we'd be okeydokey? That crazy idea that the US government should help people who can't afford a house buy them nonetheless didn't have anything to do with that? That the ratings agencies which confused risk with revenue (hey, they both start with "r") didn't have anything to do with that? That the idea that huge leverage was a cool thing didn't have anything to do with that?

Ever since the first machine-made goods were produced there has been the fear that mechanization would someday soon force workers out of jobs.  A current iteration of the fear is that unskilled Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, et al, will outperform and under-price our workers throwing lots of people out of work as their industries move overseas.  Of course, with the speed at which technology is advancing, those overseas workers may well be replaced by locally produced, desk top fabricated goods in short order.

What is certain is that, at the moment, there is a strong case to be made that people who do not have significantly better than basic literacy and a robust math and science baseline are going to be increasingly poorly equipped for a global economy that has a surfeit of manual labor and a relative shortage of intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial energy. 

The best way to combat such fears (of permanent, large cohorts of underemployed and unemployed, once middle class, and now angry and desperate, people)  is to unleash the creative energy of as many people as possible in the hope that human ingenuity will find a way to surprise us as it has so often done in the past.  John Robb sees a silver lining in the current downturn (and the future downturn in the dollar, with all the downstream effects that will ensue):

RC JOURNAL: The Dollar Crump

The beneficial upshot of this dollar crump won't be much growth in US exports (there's nobody to sell to).  What it will be is a trigger for the rapid formation of resilient communities nation-wide as we decentralize to become competitive/survive.  In short, communities that physically produce food, energy, services, security, and products at the local level and share info/insight/R&D virtually on a global level will enjoy prosperity.  The penalty for those communities that don't prepare for this shift are extreme -- favelaization and black globalization/global guerrillas await.

The Singularity encompasses the idea that technological advance will become so rapid that the world will become unrecognizable.  This is usually understood to mean the emergence or creation of Superintelligent AI.  However, our world could easily become unrecognizable long before such a development if the old models of economic functioning are broken and we fail to allow for the development of alternatives.  Can the United States remain a resilient community if we continue to tie our fortunes to oil imported from the Middle east rather than drilling here at home?  Can we remain a resilient community if we dis-incentivize our best and brightest to innovate? 

Americans have always managed to muddle through the bad times until the good times re-emerge.  I suspect we will do so again, but it would be nice if it were more apparent that our elites recognized that the times they are a changin'.

IN DEPTH: "Can the Future Be Built in America?" by Pete Engardio, BusinessWeek, 21 September 2009.

Key quote from a former CEO: "Other countries actually pay you to create jobs. The rest of the world is chewing us up alive."

The good news? "The U.S. is at or near the cutting edge in most of the emerging product areas."

The problem is not cheap Asian labor, rather it's that "the U.S. is losing its lead in large-scale high-tech manufacturing."

The diagnosis:

Much of the blame lies with U.S. government policy. Nations in Asia and Europe aggressively court strategic high-tech industries with generous tax breaks, cash grants, cheap credit, low-cost utilities, and speedy regulatory approval.

Even when our tax breaks are factored in, the U.S. corporate taxes are among the highest in the world. Michael Moore may see this as good (taxing those inherently evil corporations), but it's cutting off our nose to spite our face.

The Wall Street Journal has an article which purports to diagnose the problem as resulting from a surfeit of labor as Chinese and Indians move into the productive middle class. 

The Open MInd: Wrap-up

Jay has offered up a summary of our first effort.  I think he is correct that there is an irreducible difference of opinion and to my understanding, the core of the difference of opinion was ably stated in Jay's final paragraphs:

The Open Mind I: Wrap Up

For those on the left, this discussion (about historical transgression, not current policy choices) was long ago had, and its conclusions clearly reached. For the left, the nearly five hundred year history of colonialism, running through the 1960s, is well established history – there is no more firmly established history – as is the extended history of abuses, deceits, and, indeed, barbarisms committed almost always, perversely, in the name of highly articulated principles and values. Within this history falls the conquest of the Americas by Europe – not the discovery, but the conquest – and as part of that the atrocious record of not occasional, but constant brutality (however much returned) toward American Indians, and the unremitting record of broken vows, treaties, and dishonorable conduct. Even, for instance, the Southern tribes that became known as the Five Civilized Tribes – the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek (Muscogee) – who chose to, and made profound efforts and progress toward, assimilating as long as two hundred years ago, in agriculture, commerce, dress, education, and political organization and participation, were nonetheless consistently abused and betrayed over a hundred-year-long period that nearly destroyed, in fact, at one point, legally disenfranchised their communities.

All of this is the starting point for those on the left, no more arguable than the Holocaust, which is, and should be, beyond argument. When I made the single brief reference I did to Native America in my announcement of The Open Mind, this is the ground on which I stood. What followed followed.

None of this history determines without discussion the understanding of conditions and circumstances today or what policy choices might be made in consequence of understanding those conditions and circumstances. But that history is for the left, for me, the starting point.

If we have made no progress in reaching agreement during this debate – and who can know – I believe we have clearly progressed in delineating the differences.

It seems to me that we must continue this process with an understanding that there is a near religious difference between Liberals and Conservatives.  For the Liberal, our Nation was tainted by an "original sin" while for the Conservative our forefathers fought and struggled to arrive at a moral and ethical balance that has bequeathed us a unique Nation, a "shining city on the hill."  Conservatives do not deny that the arrival of the European white man, was a catastrophe for the Native Americans, but not only sees this in a historical context but also understand it as a step in the evolutionary development of mankind.

I believe that it is more than possible to work together, find common understandings, and agree to disagree on our religious beliefs.  A thick skin will be most useful for all as we forge ahead.

To be continued...

The Nobel Peace Prize

Much of the reaction to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama has been characterized by amazement or amusement.  For those who have long since given up on the International Community as a bastion and defender of a corrupt and deadening status quo, the Peace Prize comes as little surprise, though the alacrity with which it has been rewarded is certainly noteworthy.  Even in the precincts of the liberal left, there is an awareness that this Prize is not yet deserved and some concern as to its impact.

John Podhoretz gets it exactly right that Barack Obama has, in fact measured up tot he ideals of the Nobel Prize Committee:

The Michael Moore of Oslo

I can’t agree with my colleagues here on CONTENTIONS that a) Barack Obama should reject the Nobel Peace Prize or b) be embarrassed by it. The Nobel Committee chose him wisely because he does, in fact, represent the organization’s highest ideals.

He is an American president queasy about the projection of American power. He is an American president who rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. He is an American president eagerly in pursuit of legitimacy to be granted him not by those who voted for him but by those who do not cast a vote and who chafe at American leadership. It is his devout wish that America become one of many nations, influencing the world indirectly or not influencing it at all, rather than “the indispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright characterized it. He is the encapsulation, the representative, the wish fulfillment, the very embodiment, of the multilateralist impulse. He is, almost literally, a dream come true for the sorts of people who treasure and value the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s the most obvious choice, once you think about it, since Michael Moore won an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine.

Yet since the President will be the leader of the United States for another three years, the Commander in Chief of the world's most powerful military, and the Chief Executive of the world's most robust economy (despite the recent recession), there is good reason to be quite concerned with the impact of this award on our young President. 

Game Theory is a rigorous construct that has had important real world implications since its presentation the 1940s by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.  One of its simple yet powerful rules is that when a negative behavior is either rewarded or left unpenalized, it increases the risk of future conflict.  Thus far Barack Obama's foreign policy appears to be designed to prove to our enemies (ie, "friends we just haven't talked to yet") that we are not only not a threat but that we will actively and publicly eschew any efforts to punish behavior which once upon a time was considered wrong.  Thus, we remain silent when the Iranian Mullahs murder their own people, subvert their own election, and actively kill our military men and women in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In fact, we actively muzzle our military leaders when they take exception to Iran's behavior.  And Iran is only one example of a feckless foreign policy that aims to disarm America while empowering the enemies of all that this country once stood for. 

Every parent knows intuitively, and Game Theory has shown empirically and experimentally, that behavior that is left unpunished is behavior that is repeated.  Further, Game Theory shows that the reward for "nice" behavior in a zero sum game is not Peace, but increased conflict. 

In the "Bizarro World" of the "International Community" the Nobel Peace Prize is given to those whose behavior makes Peace less likely and War more likely.

The Open Mind I: Riposte

In reading the comments to Jay's post The Open Mind I: Call Me Irresponsible, I was, once again impressed by the obvious intelligence, breadth and depth of knowledge, and talent of the commenters.  I doubt that I have very much to add to the discussion that has already taken place there. 

It seems to me, however, that the discussion of responsibility, cultural or individual, is somewhat unnecessarily obfuscatory.  For example, when one proposes that the larger culture accept its responsibility for the destruction of the Native American culture(s), the fine line between responsibility, guilt, sin and its resultant punishment risks being erased completely.  If reparations, in some form or other, is offered to native Americans, that money will have to come from tax payers, which means that I would be required to pay for crimes that neither myself nor any of my ancestors had any hand in.  The argument then that since I am a part of the culture I must share in such responsibility is problematic for several reasons, not least because the American Indian is not a monolithic concept, a great many descendants of Native Americans have become assimilated into the culture, and there no longer exists the primal culture imagined to have once inhabited this land.  And here is where I think the entire argument fails:

There is no Native American culture without an American culture. 

[This is a conscious homage to D. W. Winnicott's comment that, when considering child therapy, "there is no baby without a mother."  In other words any change that takes place in the child is filtered through its relationship with its mother.  You can treat a child in Psychotherapy or Psychoanalysis, but never forget you are intervening in a system with multiple feedback loops and its own homeostasis.]

Allow for some elaboration.  Consider a hypothetical stone age tribe with minimal technology, a long oral tradition, and unique mythology.  That tribe's culture is over the moment it is contacted by a more highly advanced society.  In the bad, old days, the stone age culture (or any culture less developed) would be essentially exterminated by the stronger culture, with its people taken into bondage or murdered.  As people became more civilized, conquered peoples were treated somewhat better, since civilized states understood that there was ultimately greater value in maintaining the conquered than destroying them.  To my knowledge Rome was the first great civilization that had an explicit program of assimilating conquered peoples into the empire.  Rome was an exception, however.

The greatest change in ethical and moral approaches to the conquered arose from Western Civilization, yet even without physically destroying the Other, the less robust culture is doomed from the moment of contact.  Back to our hypothetical tribe of stone aged people.  Where once they would have been completely destroyed now we attempt to preserve their culture.  We no longer offer to "civilize the savages" with our religious beliefs but we do offer them our technology to adopt and adapt.  What happens next destroys the culture as surely as genocide or small pox.  Our stone age subsistence tribe lives in a precarious balance with nature, expanding its population to the limits of its ability to feed itself from the land upon which it lives.  Once we begin to meddle with our life saving technology, their numbers increase and their old ways of living can no longer support the burgeoning numbers of people.  This is the conundrum that is left out of all the equations.  I am fairly certain that those who believe we should do all we can to allow the Native to preserve his own culture would be horrified at any suggestion that medical technology should be withheld from the tribes; that would surely be barbarism.  But once their numbers have increased beyond what their culture can support, what next?  We can set up reservations upon which they can live, maintain their old ways, and forever be dependent on the larger culture (until they discover, as many Indian tribes have, more productive ways to support themselves, ie casinos, tax-free cigarettes.)  Or we can encourage assimilation in which case their native culture is preserved primarily in their myths and stories.

This is not a unique problem for Native Americans.  It is a problem for all cultures that impinge upon competing cultures and is at the core of our difficulites with the world of Islam.  For example, Eastern European Jews had a vibrant culture based on Yiddish, yet today almost no one speaks Yiddish.  An entire culture has been lost.  Yaacov Lozawick has a poignant post today, worth reading in full:

Remembrances of Things Past

Not long ago I read Aaron Lansky's fun book Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. Lansky, an American Jew with a tenuous connection to Yiddish until college, set out in the 1970s to find Yiddish books to read, realized they were mostly to be found in places with no future such as the homes or social clubs of elderly Jews whose children were not interested, and decided to gather them up. The experts he consulted told him there might be as many as 70,000 volumes to be found if he was systematic; he and his friends ended up collecting about 1,500,000. It's a poignant book - I read long stretches of it laughing and crying, both.

The people he met along the way are just about all gone by now, but so is their world, in a way far more profound than the mere passage of time would explain. Three main things did it in. The first, chronologically, was the Shoah, which destroyed the Eastern European heartland of the Yiddish world - for Yiddish, as a thriving culture, was an invention of 19th century Eastern Europe. Previous to that it had been a living language of the Jews for about a thousand years, but it hadn't been the language of their cultural creativity - that had been Hebrew, or Arabic, and near the end, German.

Second, the Yiddish world didn't survive the emigration to America. At one point Lansky notes that a significant majority of Yiddish books ever published, were published in New York. Yet the Eastern European Jews who came to the New World and the Goldene Medine migrated so their children might have better lives in the land of the free. They were wildly successful in this, but at the price of putting the new land above just about all aspects of the old country - and Yiddish was about as Old Country as possible. So the immigrants' children had no use for Yiddish, their children never knew it, and their children - mostly - neither know about it nor care in the slightest. The world of Yiddish wasn't strong enough to compete. (This goes for other lands of immigration, too - the English speaking ones, but also the French, Spanish and Portuguese ones).

The third reason the Yiddish world disappeared is that it's roots were too shallow to thrive in Israel. People who know better than I tell me Yiddish is a better tool for studying Gemara than any other language, with myriad turns of tongue that can explain an entire complicated passage in three or four words. (A teacher I study with often uses "shrek fun allen seiten" to clarify a knotty problem, but we're not really using Yiddish; it's merely a remnant). But faced with Hebrew as a living language for all parts of life, Yiddish never had a fighting chance. After 1948, when the largest group of Jews in Israel were from Arabic-speaking lands, it wasn't even in the competition.

Here is the crux of the problem for the Native American.  In the Darwinian struggle, their culture was less fit than the larger American culture.  This is not a value judgement (though I agree with my commenters who have pointed out that it was the West that invented the idea that "might doesn't always mean right"; it is also the West that invented the scientific method and the notion of progress upon which we all depend today.) 

As long as the Native American looks back to what he lost (and more often looks back to an idealized fantasy of what he lost) he will consign himself to a position of dependence and marginalization.  This is true for all "victims" who persist in their victimhood long after the trauma of loss and pain has passed.  Even if they were to gain a fraction of the money they believe is owed them, their culture is gone and will not come back.  (Perhaps some will renounce all technology brought by the Europeans since the 1600s.  I doubt that would be tolerated by the larger culture; look how much of a conundrum Christian Science presents when it comes to an ill child.)  To insist upon living a faux Native life on a reservation means that they will always be wards of the state, living off the crumbs distributed by the larger culture.  We are a wealthy culture, but life in poverty is never a joy.

[I have written quite a bit about how victimhood ensnares a person or culture in a hostile dependent position.  In Unintended Consequences, "Accidents", and Unconscious Processes I described a patient who maintained herself as a victim long after any actual insults to her had taken place.  In The Victim and his Gods I elaborated upon how a culture can come to ruin in its insistence upon its own victimhood, and noted:

Victimhood is crippling.  The victim is unable to effect changes in his environment by virtue of his need to maintain himself in a passive position in relationship to the world.  Sometimes the victim actively fights to retain his passivity and victimhood.  Patients who take this position in therapy are unaware of how they enslaving themselves and are incapable of truly changing any aspect of their lives until they are able to accept agency and responsibility.  Even the language of the pseudo-psychological helpers reveals the essential requirement that the patient never depart from the victim position.  Patients are to be empowered by the helpers to take on the system and get the benefits that are due them.  The rare patient who endeavors to find his way to independence faces tremendous impediments that make success much more difficult than it needs to be.   

I pointed out the victimhood mythos that cripples part of the American Black community in Conspiracy Theories and Victimization. 

Once a person has embraced victimhood, which includes the belief that their problems are essentially not of their own making, they are lost.  The typically short sighted and cynical empowerment movement is designed to reinforce victimhood and extort reparations of one kind or another from those who have the money and the disinclination to fight back.  The victim "wins" by getting what he deserves from the "man".  This leaves the victim forever at the mercy of others, unable to change in ways which could enable them to live more productive and successful lives, and basing their entire sense of self on their grievances.  A community that accepts such a designation can only be an abject failure.  Of course, that is not the conscious goal of the black power movement...

If Barack Obama truly wanted to start a productive discussion about race in this country, he would talk to those black men who do not graduate from high school.  He would direct his brilliant intellect and his glittering oratorical skills toward identifying the dangerous and self-defeating meta-communication that contaminates the black value system that his church professes.  He would not tolerate the excuse that racism is somehow preventing them from learning.  He would not presume that more money to a system that is failing will somehow make it succeed without fundamental changes in approach.  He would not reaffirm to his black audience that their problems are not their responsibility. 

Black Americans have a long legacy of racism to overcome.  They will never overcome until they are willing to stop being victims.

As long as  people insist upon remaining victims, their culture will be forever trapped in amber, and they will be left wondering through the world as zombies, neither fully alive nor dead.]

My ancestors came from Eastern Europe and my grandparents spoke Yiddish, which I do not speak.  They left because life for Jews was untenable and they came to America where they could become Americans and remain Jews.  A great many Native Americans have become Americans who can take pride in what has been lost as they also take pride in what they have become part of. 

At this point I do not think the question of original (colonial) sin can be settled.  I do not know the case that Jay is most focused on but would hope that a court, wiser than me, can find a way to end the litigation and allow the claimants to get on with their lives.  Sadly, no matter how much money they do or do not receive, they do not have a culture to go back to, only the choice of a culture to join or life as a simulacrum in a simulation.  With enough money the simulation can be made more comfortable, perhaps even superficially convincing, but it will not being their culture back.

I did not intend to address questions about our treatment of the Native American, however, it is a rich vein to mine.  I appreciate Jay's attempts to address the comments directly in his follow up comments.  I know he has been pessimistic, as have some of my commenters, on the feasibility of this attempt, but I hope we can continue and hone our arguments.